


Touch

by NotRoyalty



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, but mostly Felicity and Oliver love each other, everyone on team arrow loves each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 15:59:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2698847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotRoyalty/pseuds/NotRoyalty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity needs human contact, so she starts with her friends in team arrow. Set vaguely in the middle of s2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

Felicity realized that she was touch-starved when she was at the dentist. It wasn't like she never got hugs from her friends when she saw them (as rare as that may be with her insane schedule), but when her dentist touched the side of her jaw to indicate where her filled tooth was causing pain, she almost leaned into his touch. It wasn't sexual, or even friendly, but Felicity couldn't honestly remember the last time someone had touched her with affection.

So she started touching people more. 

It started with Sara down in the lair.

"I'm almost done running this trace," Sara said, typing away at the computer. Felicity had finally allowed her to do some of the computer work when she realized that as much as Sara could do, Felicity was still the computer guru of team arrow. "Could you pass me the card with the address on it?"

"Yup," Felicity replied, getting up.

As she was trying to edge around Sara where she leaned on the computer desk, she put her hand on her back. Sara stilled for a fraction of a second, but kept typing without a word.

"Want me to read it off?" Felicity asked, squinting at Oliver's frankly terrible handwriting. 

"That'd be great," Sara replied.

After that, it was as if there was an unspoken agreement between the two of them. Whenever Felicity made an especially spectacular hack, Sara would pat her shoulder, and Felicity would give her shoulder rubs from time to time.

* * *

 Diggle was the first to notice the contact between Sara and Felicity, and whenever he saw, he would smile a little.

Felicity decided that he would be next. For him, she started it with a fist bump after he managed to down Oliver for once.

"That's a rare sight," she said, pausing on her way to the computer. Still looking down at Oliver, she held out her fist. 

 _Please don't leave me hanging_ , she prayed for a second, and then she felt his hard knuckles bump against hers.

Oliver looked up at them with an especially annoyed expression before the chuckling Diggle helped him up.

With that, First bumps became her and Diggle's main form of contact, with the occasional hi-five.

* * *

 Felicity really wasn't sure if Oliver would take kindly to being touched. He was more tan happy to do it for a cover, but Felicity didn't know if that was a conscious part of it he had to maintain. 

So she stared slow with little things.

"You look like you could use some help, mister," she said, moving over to where Oliver was trying to clean a cut on his back he had gotten from falling onto gravel. 

Oliver grunted and handed her the wet cloth. She bent so she was on the level of the cut and carefully cleaned the dirt out of the cut. Her small fingers looked oddly pale and delicate next to his scarred skin. 

"This is going to hurt," she warned, pouring alcohol onto the cloth.

"I've had worse," he grunted as she pressed against the cut. 

Felicity didn't respond as she put a bandaid on it.

"All better," she promised, briefly brushing his shoulder blade before returning to her computer.

Oliver stayed there for a long moment before he got up and moved towards the door. 

* * *

Felicity was in a haze of tiredness, her neck aching, and wrists cramping from typing. She'd been chasing a cyber criminal across the internet for what felt like a week, and she had just pinned down his location and sent it to the police. 

"Done," she groaned, resting her head in her hands, vaguely registering that Oliver was the only one left in the lair. 

She heard him move, and then, tentatively, his hands touched her shoulders and tenderly rubbed the base of her neck. 

"You did good," he said quietly, and he was gone. 

Felicity took that as an invitation. She would bump shoulders with Sara, and hi-five Diggle, but with Oliver it was different. Whenever she touched him it was quiet, unobserved thing. A brush on his hand when she gave him something, a squeeze of the shoulder when he looked dishearten. 

When Felicity came down to the lair one night, she found Oliver sitting in the middle of the training mats with a picture held in his hands. Moving slowly, she came around behind him and looked down it the photograph. It was him and his father before the island. 

"It's his birthday," he said in way of explanation. 

Wordlessly, Felicity sat down beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. 

"I know you miss him," she said quietly after a long time. 

"I do," he said in the voice full of pain that he tried so hard to keep quiet. 

They stayed there until Felicity's leg went to sleep, and she had to shift. The second her head rose from Oliver's shoulder, he was moving again, and it was time for her to get back to her computers. 

After that, Oliver started touching her back, but only when she was the only one in the lair. He would squeeze her shoulder, or lean a little closer to her when she was showing him something. Felicity had to keep herself from leaning that last half inch and resting her head against his cheek. 

* * *

But one day, she didn't keep herself. 

They were looking at pictures from the Count's operations, and Oliver had gone very quiet. Felicity could feel his breath right next to her shoulder, and she stopped clicking next, and leaned her head with bated breath. Her hair brushed against his chin, catching on his stubble, and Felicity heard his breath suck in. She clicked the pictures away, and let her head rest there. 

Eventually, she lifted her head and got up, taking her cold mug of coffee over to the sink and pouring it down. 

"I almost lost you to him," Oliver said quietly, his eyes fixed on the empty monitor. 

"Yeah, but you didn't," she said, setting the empty mug down. 

Oliver didn't respond, and Felicity could see the muscle in his jaw jumping. It was ridiculous, Felicity thought, and marched across the room and wrapped her small arms around his torso.

"I'm much harder to get rid of than that," she said, and she felt a breath leak out of him like a sigh as he relaxed and wrapped his arms around her too. 

"Felicity," he said, pulling back with his martyr expression, "in my line of work-"

Felicity shut him up by pressing her lips against his. "I know," she said, backing up so there was an inch between there lips. "I might die at any moment." She rolled her eyes. "I've heard all this before, and guess what? I'm still alive, and I'm not going to live my life isolated in a bubble just because someone I care about might get a paper cut. When you do that, you start thinking that your dentist touching your jaw is the most affectionate anyone has been to you in- I don't know, too long." She was babbling, she realized, and Oliver was trying not to laugh.

She was going to tell him off for it, but then he was kissing her, and she decided to leave it for later.

* * *

The next time Felicity went to the dentist, she was the farthest thing from touch starved.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you find any grammatical errors.


End file.
